


Switching Gears

by Destina



Category: Fast and the Furious Series
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 18:23:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destina/pseuds/Destina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes a lifetime for Brian to figure out he was born to break the rules.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Switching Gears

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chosenfire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chosenfire/gifts).



1.

As far back as he could remember, Brian had been addicted to the thrill of speed and the danger of going as fast as he could go. Riding a wave, flipping the end of a skateboard around in mid-air and orienting himself in the sky, diving a bike over the edge of a steep hill -- it was all the same, and it was all good.

He collected broken bones like tokens, proof he'd managed to conquer each objective. There was never anyone to pick him up, never anyone to tell him it was all right, to soothe the ache of a bone knitting itself together, the hollow pain of healing alone. He grew used to the vacuum, because there was nothing to compare it to. He'd never had anyone, so he never had anyone to miss.

Scars accumulated all over his body, each one tied to a victory over the laws of physics. Some of those laws, Brian broke deliberately and with glee. Some were accidents, triumphs he never planned for or imagined until he was doing the impossible, a smile flashing across his face each time he flew higher, went faster.

Subverting the expected order of things came as naturally to him as breathing. Breaking the law was just another facet of that pattern.

2.

They drove south in tandem, Brian chasing Dom and Dom chasing revenge. When the sun rose at Brian's left shoulder, he was playing chicken with Dom down a two-lane highway, a friendly game of tag to take the pressure off, take his mind off where they were headed.

What they were about to do.

All his life, Brian had been slow to find the truth about himself. Too late, he realized he should never have put on a badge - not the first time he did it, hoping to do good for the world, and not the second time, hoping for redemption. After so many years of skirting the edges of the law, he should have come to see it sooner: redemption wasn't bound up in brass, and it couldn't be slipped on in the morning like a suit and tie, a costume to disguise his sins.

Finding his way back was about greasy T-shirts and cold beers over a lifted engine block. It was about coming to terms with the hundred names he'd blown through, every one sounding less true than the one before it, until he heard Dom say the one that was real.

They pulled into a dirt lot overlooking the city, sun bright and warm overhead, and Dom got out of the car without a word. Brian had realized long ago that words don't mean much in the scheme of things. He had used them to get under Dom's skin, to change his fate and Dom's life forever. Being a born liar could take a man to a place where the only thing he could do was offer up silence, and hope it still had meaning.

In Dom's hand, there was a slip of paper, and the details it held would be the end of Brian's career. Maybe of his life. But he owed it to Letty, and even more, he owed it to Dom. He would see it through.

Dom watched him without turning his head -- Dom was always watching him, whether because he expected Brian to turn on him again, or because he didn't, Brian couldn't be sure. But they were in it together, to the end.

3.

Brian learned five hard lessons in his first year as a cop.

The first was that the job took everything he had to give, and gave nothing back -- at least, nothing he could count on, nothing tangible. The end of each day was an exercise in exhaustion, his body so wired to expect disaster he could barely function once the alarms were shut down.

The second was less obvious: excess energy at the end of a tough day had a tendency to find the wrong outlets -- booze and bar brawls, the violence of everyday life made small in petty ways. On the heels of that lesson, he found himself fucking anyone who smiled in his direction, any willing body to channel the jittery energy into pleasure instead of pain. He lost track of names, of faces, and instead he focused on the hard press of big hands on his hips, or the soft comfort of warm, tight welcome.

He should have anticipated the third lesson. The job made him forget what he was, before, and all that was left was what it made him become. There were days undercover when he would pull a girl into his arms and stutter over his name, worried he'd betray himself, put her in danger.

After that, he made his peace with distance, with living in the cold instead of seeking out warmth.

In the end, the fourth lesson found him, and it caught him off guard just like all important lessons had before. There were only so many ways to pretend to be something he was not; there were only so many ways to fool himself into continuing a lie. No one ever told him there would be a moment where he'd have to choose, and that choosing wouldn't be as easy as invoking his authority.

Being a cop meant nothing, in the face of betrayal so deep he could never climb back out again.

The fifth lesson was the most difficult of all. Everything that made him perfect for the work -- reading the minutia of body language, wearing a smile like a flawless mask, selling his soul to the devil without a backward glance -- made him imperfect for the work as well. Flaws like the ones Brian brought to the job were like cracks in a piece of fine china; strike the edge the wrong way, and the fragile whole would shatter.

When he landed on the other side of a line he hadn't consciously drawn, he finally began to understand: imperfections were marks of character, forged out of stress, revealed only under pressure. They weren't fatal. Each jagged line pointed the way to becoming whole.

4.

The shithole motel they checked into was barely a shack, set at the edge of a dirt road with a cantina across the street. They took one room, no discussion, no hesitation. Brian caught his breath when Dom tossed his duffel on the bed; it seemed too easy.

Too right.

The cantina beckoned, tiny and cramped, full of sleepy, half-drunk patrons nursing tequila in dirty glasses. He and Dom pulled out two chairs and spent an hour drinking beer in silence, watching the sun set and night creep up the sky. It wasn't Dom's hard, pissed-off silence, the kind Brian had become used to, like a physical weight on his skin. Instead, it was an open silence, one that allowed for possibilities, for Dom's flickering glances, quick like flames against Brian's skin.

Brian closed his eyes and listened to the murmur of men talking at other tables, a language he had a passing acquaintance with, but which sounded strange to him so far from home, displaced and unfamiliar. When he opened his eyes, Dom was looking at him again, probably had been for a long time. It had been five years since Dom last looked at him that way, and Brian had never thought he'd see it again.

"You like this," Dom said. "The adrenaline rush. That's why you race. That's why you're here."

Brian smiled and polished off his warm beer. "That's not why I'm here."

Dom nodded, as if he'd only just begun to understand what Brian was offering. He sat back in his chair, and to Brian, it seemed he was coiled, ready to spring, to strike. "Mia," he said, his voice low.

"It's not going to work," Brian said. He couldn't keep the wistfulness from his voice, because it was true, and because there was a time he hadn't wanted it to be true. "It was never going to work, Dom. It was all built on lies."

"Except for how you felt about her," Dom said. "Because if I thought that was a lie, I'd break you in two."

"No," Brian said. He sipped his beer. "That wasn't a lie. It was just...a misdirection."

"Whose?" Dom asked. "Yours, or hers?"

"Both." Brian leaned forward against the table, his leg jittering with nervous energy. "I'm not what she wants."

"You might want to think about how you've got that turned around."

It startled Brian, the way Dom could cut to the heart of it so easily. He folded his arms across the table, looked down at the rotted wood grain of it, so fragile beneath his skin. "Believe me, I have. I thought about it every day for five years."

"And here you are."

"Yeah. Yeah, here I am."

Behind them, Juarez was a glittering pane of glass, reflecting back the sun from a thousand windows as it rolled down past the horizon. Brian met Dom's eyes, ready for anything -- a fight, a dismissal. A loss so great he hadn't even begun to process how its absence would alter him.

Dom pushed back the chair and stood, tossing back the last of his beer. "Let's go, then," he said, leading the way.

Brian followed, because it was the only thing left in all the world he wanted to do.

5.

The first time Brian ever wanted anything for himself, he stole it. Years later, he was still ashamed by the memory, or maybe what the memory had mutated into, a living pit of regret in his chest.

Taking things that didn't belong to him wasn't as simple as making a choice. It was easy to become confused, to feel entitled to happiness in its most available and convenient form.

It took Brian a long time to get that sometimes, the most accessible forms of joy were not the ones most worth having.

6.

Dom put him against the wall, in the half-dark of their tiny room. Face against the tacky wallpaper, Brian tried to remember simple breathing, but his body wouldn't cooperate. Everything in him strained to come away from the wall, back into Dom, back where he belonged.

It was easy, from there. Dom put his hands on Brian, stripped his shirt off, touched him with sure, gentle hands. He tasted Brian, lips pressed to the skin between his shoulder blades, the hollow at the small of his back. He slid inside Brian like it was inevitable, and when Brian's head was tipped back on Dom's shoulder, Dom moving inside him, Brian knew it for the only truth that had ever existed between them.

"You want this," Dom said, a breath at the back of Brian's neck, like a question, holding Brian's wrists in place with a touch so light, it was barely there.

Brian pushed back against him, giving in to the desire so strong within him it was like a second heartbeat, and Dom's breath hitched, his hips driving faster, deeper into Brian, until there was nothing but Dom around him, inside him, burning through him like a fire he could not control and would never be able to stop.

Dom's hands on him, Dom's breath fast and out of control, the force of his want so plain and palpable, it was like a living thing in the room with them -- that was what Brian had been chasing, all along.

7.

"Do you fuck like you fight?" Dom asked, voice a low rumble against Brian's chest, his warm body covering Brian's in the stifling heat of the room. Brian wanted it, all of Dom under his hands, the sweat and blood he'd fought to keep Dom from spilling.

At first, Brian couldn't decipher it, what Dom was asking. All their fights had been about self-preservation, about lies, and their aftermath. And then Brian thought maybe that was the point.

"Hell, no," Brian breathed, his smile a little rusty as it tried to remember how to form, genuine and joyful. "I fuck like I drive."

"Show me," Dom said, and arched with a grin when Brian's hand closed around his cock, sure and ready.

8.

The moment it all snapped into place, when everything achieved perfect clarity, was the moment Brian thought he was going to die.

Dom crouched beside him, the desert filled with sun and pain and the shrill wail of sirens, the sound of a life Brian thought should be fading into the distance, and not coming closer every moment.

They joked, but there was no humor in it. Brian wanted to make him run, wanted to stand up, push him toward the car, send him out into the desert the way they'd planned. The fire under his skin, where his blood spilled out, stole that last desperate plan from him.

In the instant before fate screeched to a stop beside them in the brown dirt, Dom took Brian's mouth, pressing into him like he could hold Brian together with nothing more than the force of his will and his presence. All Brian could think was that he'd never asked him to stay, never wanted anything more in his life, never bargained for any of it, though it was his now, to capture if he could, to keep if he knew how.

Dom stopped running, then, in the space between breaths, but Brian knew it was only temporary. He couldn't feel the ground beneath him anymore, didn't know which direction they would go, but they would find the path, and they would go together.

He'd been breaking the law since he was old enough to realize anything was possible. It had taken him a lifetime to understand that everything was subjective, that lines were often invisible and names were only concepts, not tied down to beating hearts and the cage of bone and skin surrounding them.

Dom pressed his hand over Brian's where it rested against his belly.

"When shit goes down, you listen for the sound of that ten second car," Brian said, willing Dom to understand.

Dom smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place during Fast and Furious (Fast Four) and is not canon-compliant. Thanks to A. for beta.


End file.
